Readings: 1 Kings 19.4-8 / Psalm 33.2-3, 4-5, 6-7, 8-9 (R/v 9a) / Ephesians 4.30-5.2 / John 6.41-5
Dear sisters and brothers, have you ever found yourself reflecting on why you have been invited to an event?
Invited to a special event, like a friend’s 21st birthday dinner or a family wedding, your child’s graduation or spouse’s promotion ceremony? Or, invited to the ordinary gatherings of family meals and drinks with friends?
Today we are here for Mass. We gather to listen to God’s Word, through our readings, and to be nourished by God’s bread, through the Eucharist. We are really here for Jesus who is God’s Word and God’s bread for us.
Jesus tells us in today’s gospel passage that “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father”. If Jesus is right, we are only here because God wants us to be here.
You might say however that you are here because “I have to fulfil my Sunday obligation”. Or, that “I am accompanying my Catholic spouse and children”. Or, that “I have my warden, my lector, my communion minister, my choir, my altar server duty”.
Whatever the reason, I believe that deep down we truly know that we are here because God invites us here – and we have come.
Why would God invite us here – always invite us here – to Eucharist when we sometimes feel like we shouldn’t be here because we struggle with sin? Because we are hungry and God knows it.
We live as hungry people in a hungry world. Isn’t this why we hunger for more than we already have? More learning and tuition for better grades. More work opportunities to succeed, to be promoted, to earn more. More pay for more things so we can live the good life. More and more.
Yes, to be human and alive is to be always looking for something to sustain and nourish our lives, something that will feed and energise us every day, something that will fill, satisfy and complete our lives.
Don’t we already have that? We have faith to give us meaning and family, for purpose. We have shelter, food and health to sustain us. We have enough to live relatively well, with a little more for the extras. We have citizenship and community, and a share in the common good. I’d like to believe we already have enough – enough bread to live.
Yet, many of us want more. The problem is not so much that we don’t have but that we are hungry – hungry not for more but hungry really for the right bread to fill us with.
Metaphorically speaking, the world and us eat many varieties of bread today.
In the Middle East, those fighting eat the bread of violence and war. In the US, Republicans and Democrats share the bread of negativity, hostility, and name-calling. In Europe, many eat the bread that they are stronger, purer and better and do not want to share the foreign bread of immigrants and refugees.
Closer to home, some eat the bread that never satisfies: local is bad, foreign is good. Some demanding rights and self-expression are forcing their bread onto others, instead of breaking bread together.
All of us here have eaten the bread of power of control, of insisting we are right and getting our way. We sometimes eat the bread of hurt feelings and resentment, the bread of loneliness and fear, the bread of sorrow or guilt. Other times, and I hope many a time, we eat bread that gives us life, makes us happy, fulfills our wants, and we generously it with many too. Yet, we seem to want more.
There is indeed an appetite so basic, so powerful, so natural to who we are as humans. This appetite is our hunger for God. For God who alone can complete us and make us happy. This is why we hunger for God: we are made for God.
In last week’s gospel, the people looked for Jesus to feed them. He offered them God instead. “Do not work for the food that perishes,” he taught them and us last week, “but for the food that endures for eternal life.” Only God can give food for eternal life. Jesus himself is this food.
Today we hear these people murmuring in disbelief that Jesus is God’s bread to them. They cannot believe because they see Jesus only as a man, son of Joseph and Mary. They fail to see him revealing God through his life and ministry.
So, Jesus teaches them that it is God who invites and draws them to him. To him who will save them from death. To him who will teach them about God and to live in God’s ways. To him who they can believe is their bread of life, their salvation for eternal life.
Today’s gospel ends with Jesus proclaiming: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world”. He is indeed the bread of life for us and the world.
We come to the Eucharist to receive Jesus in consecrated bread and wine. Do we come really believing in Jesus as God’s bread to feed us in our hunger and to save us in our need?
Jesus is God’s bread that also and always sustains us on earth. This was how Elijah experienced God’s bread come down to him. God’s bread fed and saved him. And it nourished and sustained him for his journey through the desert to God’s mountain. This is why we must pay attention to the angel’s action of waking Elijah up a second time to eat. His action is to teach us that God’s bread is necessary for us: it is bread that strengthens.
Don’t we come again and again to the Eucharist to be strengthened and sustained, like Elijah? Strengthened and sustained to go through life’s many challenges as we journey home to God?
We want Jesus. We hunger for him as our daily bread. But we struggle to come to him because of our sinfulness, our doubts about God and our disappointment with God.
Yet God still calls us to come to Jesus. God sends angels into our lives to do this, like God did to Elijah. Who are the family, friends, and fellow Christians who keep inviting us to Jesus, again and again?
And isn’t their invitation really to come to Jesus in “The Eucharist”, which Pope Francis reminds us “is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.” (The Joy of the Gospel, §47). Medicine and nourishment to transform us who receive Jesus in faith into a living Eucharist. This is how we become what we receive: the Body of Christ.
Isn’t this transformation why God invites us repeatedly to come to Jesus? That in Jesus we are not just saved to live and to have the fullness of life, but we also become like Jesus for others. Our transformed lives, Paul reminds us the second reading, will then be marked by Christ-like kindness, compassion, forgiveness towards others, and even sacrificial love to reconcile them to God.
Today God invites us, again: not to an event but to the person of Jesus. To Jesus who reveals himself to be God’s Bread. God’s bread we receive in our hands that is broken and distributed for the life of the world. God’s bread that we consume because it is to be eaten, but never exhausted. God’s bread that we say “Amen” to because it consecrates all who believe in Jesus, and eat him. Indeed, Jesus is God’s True Bread to feed our hunger and satisfy our appetite.
God’s invitation presents us with a task. To come to Jesus and to taste and see God’s goodness in Jesus who feeds us, saves us, gives us life. We have more to do however. We have to come remembering always that we are hungry, even desperate for the food, the sustenance that Jesus is our lives. This why being hungry for Jesus must matter in our lives.
Today Jesus reminds us that no one can come to him unless drawn by God. We are here because God invites us in our hunger for life. Aren’t we blessed that God makes us hungry for Jesus, His bread of life?
Inspired by the Trappist Monks of St Joseph’s Abbey, Spencer, MA.
Preached at Church of the Transfiguration
photo: http://olmlaycarmelites.org
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